Thoughts on Software Engineering

Crypto-Wallets: A Technical Perspective – Nakov @ OpenFest 2018

Today a gave a technical talk titled “Crypto Wallets: A Technical Perspective” at the OpenFest 2018 conference in Sofia about crypto wallets, wallet standards and the cryptography behind them, with live examples in JavaScript.

Video from BGOUG – Nov 2018 (Bulgarian)

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About the “Crypto Wallets” Technical Talk

In this talk I explained the concepts of crypto-wallets used by the blockchain developers to securely keep the private keys controlling the blockchain addresses and crypto-assets. The different wallet types (brain, paper, desktop, mobile, online, hardware) were introduced and demonstrated. The speaker explained the basic concepts and gave examples how to use and interact with keystores (holding a single ECC-based private key) and hierarchical deterministic wallets (HD wallets), which use mnemonic phrases with key-derivation based on the BIP39 and the BIP44 standards to keep multiple private keys.

All attendees were invited to create their own crypto-wallet and get some testing crypto-coins (Ethereum Ropsten Testnet ethers – ETHt) and send a few blockchain transactions (using the Jaxx mobile wallet).

All concepts were demonstrated with live examples in JavaScript: creating a simple wallet, encrypting and saving it; creating a new random HD wallet and creating an HD wallet from mnemonic phrase, along with deriving private keys.